George Lucas Had To Tell Liam Neeson And Ewan McGregor To Stop Making Lightsaber Sounds While Shooting ‘Star Wars’
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Making a “Star Wars” movie isn’t child’s play.
Appearing this week on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast, actor Liam Neeson recalled his experience filming “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace”.
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In particular, he remembered director George Lucas having to tell him and co-star Ewan McGregor to stop making lightsaber sounds with their mouths while filming.
“The first time we actually had to use the lightsaber to start a little fight… We both automatically [made the noises],” Neeson said. “George said, ‘Let’s cut there. Boys, we can add that in later.’”
Others have also had trouble on “Star Wars” sets with refraining from doing their own sound effects.
In the commentary track on the home video release of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”, director Rian Johnson said that actress Laura Dern would make “pew” noises when firing her blaster.
“You can see Laura Dern say ‘pew’ when she fires the gun, which she could never not do every time she shot it,” he said.
Dern also talked about it herself on an episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, telling the host, “I was back in my bedroom at eight years old. Doing the scene, I went, ‘Pew-pew!’ They’ve taken the sound out, I don’t think you’ll hear that in the movie. I was so excited! I mean, it’s ‘Star Wars’!”
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On O’Brien’s podcast, Neeson also remembered working on a film with such cutting-edge digital effects for its time, and not knowing what the CGI characters around him would ultimately look like.
“I was supposed to being doing this scene with [Watto], a little flying monster,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what this thing was going to look like. It was a green tennis ball that was eventually going to be this flying monster. I’m in the makeup chair, and the lady says, ‘I did see a mock-up of the monster, and you could be a monkey smoking a pipe and no one is going to be looking at you.’”
